Dr. Ferrucci of Watson fame to headline IIUG conference

After the Watson Jeopardy contest, I saw couple of very good presentations at ibmwatson.com, reading up on the work in the book Final Jeopardy. I'm half way thru the book... will review the book in another blog.

Dr. Ferrucci is the lead researcher and Principal Investigator for the
Watson/Jeopardy! project. He has been a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J.
Watson's Research Center since 1995 where he heads up the Semantic Analysis and
Integration department. Dr. Ferrucci focuses on technologies for automatically
discovering valuable knowledge in natural language content and using it to
enable better decision making.

In 2007, Dr. Ferrucci accepted the Jeopardy! challenge. Dr. Ferrucci was
tasked to create a computer system that can rival human champions at the game of
Jeopardy!. Introducing Watson, IBM's computer powered by DeepQA technology.
Watson appeared on three Jeopardy! episodes, in February 2011, where man vs
machine was put to the test. Watson was able to answer questions posed in
natural language to defeat two past Jeopardy! all time winning
champions.